ANNOUNCEMENTS

Docker’s experimental binary gives you access to bleeding edge features that are not in, and may never make it into, Docker’s official release. An experimental build allows users to try out features early and give feedback to the Docker maintainers. In this way, we hope to refine our feature designs by exposing earlier to real-world usage.

As with the last update to Compose, Swarm and Machine, we’re releasing versions alongside the new version of Engine at DockerCon 2015. In all three projects we’ve made some big steps towards production readiness, stability, and new integrations such as Mesos support in Swarm.

Today at DockerCon 2015, we are incredibly proud to announce that this open collaboration from the Docker team has paid off. Docker are indeed delivering on the promise of “batteries included but swappable”. As a user of Docker, you can now can extend the capabilities of the Docker Engine by loading third-party plugins.

After our initial progress report, we are excited to announce a new networking system for Docker Engine. Containers can now communicate with each across hosts and configuring networking has been made much more flexible. What’s more, this functionality is entirely pluggable with networking drivers, so you can choose a networking system that best suits your infrastructure without locking your app into any particular system.

We’re pleased to announce huge updates to Engine, Compose, Swarm and Machine, as well as an preview of new networking and plugin systems. We’ve been working really hard with the community to improve the quality of our projects, and this release includes a bunch of things to help with that. As part of the new networking and plugins systems in Engine, the networking and volumes systems have been completely rewritten. Also, Swarm and Compose have taken some big strides towards stability and production readiness.

This morning, Docker, along with a broad coalition of vendors, users, start-ups, and industry leaders, made one of the more significant [announcements] in the history of containerization. In brief, we are coming together to form a minimalist, non-profit, openly governed project, The Open Container Project, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation for the express purpose of defining common specifications around container format and runtime. Docker will be donating both our base container format and runtime, runC, to this project, to help form the cornerstone for the new technology. And, in a particularly exciting recent development, the talented people behind appc are now joining us as co-founders.

NEWS

Its approach to packaging software in a way that makes it easy to quickly take an application from the developer’s laptop and deploy it in production in the company’s data center or in a public cloud has drawn a lot of attention from developers and DevOps professionals, and nearly every major IT vendor and service provider has been eager to get on board by either partnering with Docker or at least supporting the technology.

The Docker container platform can now supply software-defined networking (SDN) to an application that gets deployed as multiple containers on multiple hosts. The SDN capability ensures that the distributed containers can communicate with each other and remain connected, even if some are moved.

Docker is holding its developer conference in San Francisco today, so it’s no surprise that the company is rolling out quite a few updates to its software container solution. Maybe the biggest announcement of the day is the launch of the Open Container Project — an attempt to create a standard container format and runtime under the Linux Foundation that’s supported by the likes of Docker, CoreOS (which had been working on its own competing format), Microsoft, Google, Amazon, RedHat and VMware.

As part of what promises to be a large wave of announcements from Monday’s DockerCon 2015 in San Francisco, Docker Inc. CTO Solomon Hykes introduced to a packed conference hall a new component of Docker containerization called “Docker Network,” to be previewed to developers through a new non-production distribution channel.

As its DockerCon conference kicks off today in San Francisco, Docker has announced new features for its software container technology, including software-defined networking (SDN) and a swappable plugin architecture.

Docker, the startup that has popularized open-source technology for packaging up applications into containers, is introducing new software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities as a result of its SocketPlane acquisition.

Docker says the software-defined networking technology acquired with startup SocketPlane in March is now part of the open-source container platform, helping ensure that multiple containers inside a distributed app communicate easily over IP networks and across infrastructures.

FROM THE COMMUNITY

In today’s business environment, companies are being asked to go faster than ever before: faster time to market, faster response to customers, faster reactions to market shifts. Having a good idea isn’t enough; companies not only need to have a good idea, but they need get it to market fast, and quickly iterate on improvements to that idea. Speed is a competitive advantage.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve been witnessing a rapid transformation in the way applications are built, packaged, shipped, deployed, and instantiated. This change has been driven by developer demands for simplicity and a shift in focus towards an application-centric view of IT. To find evidence of this trend, look no further than the skyrocketing popularity of Docker and the movement towards microservice based architectures for running applications.

A while ago I reported on a proof of concept that made Weave act as a Docker extension. Much of the necessary groundwork for that has now landed in Docker’s experimental channel, with the net result being that we can now offer Weave as a network driver plugin, giving a closer integration to Docker.

Virtualization brought significant changes in networking by moving the edge of the network in the server itself. This led to a significant increase of network endpoints and new requirements for the network in terms of provisioning for both speed and flexibility. To a certain extent the ideas of virtualization and cloud gave birth to the whole notion of software defined networking (SDN) since the network needed to keep up with the deployment speeds of virtual machines (VMs).

One of the key challenges with third-party networking solutions for Docker has been how to make the user experience seamless. Up to now, we’ve relied on Powerstrip which provides a tool for prototyping extensions to Docker. We were excited when Docker announced their intention to integrate a networking plug-in capability into their core distribution, and have been working closely with the Docker team and broader community to provide input to the evolving API definition. And we are thrilled that, as of Docker 1.7, libnetwork will be integrated with Docker to provide an API for networking with support for third-party plugins in the Docker experimental channel.

So we can all agree that Docker is cool. Containers are cool, repeatability is cool, portability is cool, we’re all cool. Everything is unicorns and rainbows. But something is missing in this fairy tale land, and it’s something we all like to forget about. With this wide world of other containers and services out there (“world wide web” anyone?), we want to make use of these things and connect ourselves in.

Today IBM is announcing the delivery of industry leading enterprise class containers, that make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments. Containers give developers flexibility to build once and move applications without the need to rewrite or redeploy their code. IBM Containers, based on Docker and built on Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service, provide a more efficient environment that enables faster integration and access to analytics, big data and security services.

Builds often require that credentials or tooling be available to the slave node which runs it. For a small installation with few specialized jobs, this may be manageable using generic slaves, but when these requirements are multiplied by the thousands of jobs that many organizations running per day, managing and standardizing these slave environments becomes more challenging.

nveiled today at DockerCon 2015, VMware AppCatalyst is an API and Command Line Interface (CLI)-driven hypervisor that is purpose-built for developers. A technology preview, VMware AppCatalyst offers developers a fast and easy way to replicate a private cloud locally on their desktop for building and testing containerized and microservices-based applications. The tool features Project Photon, an open source minimal Linux container host, Docker Machine and integration with Vagrant. VMware AppCatalyst is ready to be downloaded today for Mac OS X at no cost from the AppCatalyst technology preview community site here (registration required). The community site enables participants to provide detailed technology feedback and seek assistance.

Join our next Docker online meetup recapping all of the news from DockerCon including demos of the latest features of Docker 1.7. The meetup is on Monday, June 29 at 10:00 PDT / 19:00 CEST – click here to register!